OBJECTIVES

Define if Users need this app

Ideate how to satisfy their needs

Build a prototype to test ideas

Implement the idea to final design

Empathize

My design process starts with “Why” to clearly understand the people we are designing for and ends with the solution to their needs. Research is the best way to gain insight into peoples lives to create the best experience. Before starting my research I set up some objectives to help with outcome of the overall research.

Research questions

I approached patients who’d had dental issues in the past to gain a deeper understanding and to be able to solve problems from their perceptive.

Please tell me your name, age, location, and job title.

Have you had any dental issues?

Are you currently visiting any dentists at the moment?

How did you find the dentist you wanted to visit?

In the past visits, how was the appointment booking process?

Do you know what treatment you are currently / were on?

Did you ever change the dentist you were visiting?

What would be useful in a dental app?

What would make you book an appointment with a dentist?

Competitor Analysis

Two services help users with finding and booking an appointment, but have the following limitations;

No app for iOS or Android

No proper reviews on the website

No images of the clinics

No proper booking method

No details about the dentists that work in clinic

No reminders

Do not show health care service providers they work with.

Define

Conducting the survey helped us gain useful insights about the users. I made an affinity diagram with everything we collected, where I found interesting opportunities for the product.

I analysed the results and noticed users behaviour and pain points.

Most users booked appointments through phone calls and visiting the clinic

Most users discovered clinics through friends and searching on google

Most users left their previous dentist for not offering professional services as advertised

Users are interested in proper reviews, photos, pricing, clinics near located near them, get reminders and what health care the clinic accepts

To better understand the user needs and their point of view, I created User Stories to help articulate WHO, WHAT & WHY.

IDEATE

Knowing what problems I have to focus on, I started to generate ideas for the features of my app and design its structure. I sketched the main User Flow, which helped me to detect & guide all possible actions done by the user.

Prototype

The next step was to test design ideas and put them on to paper and digital. I started with Low Fidelity, Mid Fidelity and the High Fidelity wireframes. With this I was able to cost-efficiently test my design and iterate it based on user’s feedback.

After many iterations I was finally able to create high-fidelity wireframes. This allowed me to focus on correctly distributing content along with navigation and interface elements.

Visual Design

I started collecting visual ideas and images by creating a mood board. The main visual features were simplicity, bold typography, good images and clean icons.

Handover

After completing the main visual design I created a UI guide to help developers guide them through the brands identity to produce consistent designs.

Website

For the website we decided to go with the clean, simple design which makes an ideal fit for today’s popular flat aesthetic. Vector-only shapes scale to any size, including retina, with no optimisation required.

Here are the few lessons from this project.

Always prioritise your design efforts to the main requirements first and then only move to designing colourful stuff.

The second one is there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Users are accustomed to using patterns changing the way patterns work will disrupt their flow.